I guess this post is partly to advertise that I’m still around, and partly to announce that there’s nothing to announce!

Life has been quite busy for me lately – much has happened in my private life; whilst not all of it could be considered “good”, it’s ended up quite constructive overall, so it’s not all bad either!

On a personal note, I’m nearing the end of my first week “smoke-free” which has been, frankly, more of a challenge than I had originally expected. Feeling much better for it generally (sleeping better, overall much happier), though it’s darn tough at times when the cravings strike. I’m hoping to use this as an opportunity to get more coding done, but that probably won’t really happen until July onwards when I’m expecting to move house.

I’m still a little puzzled by why my sound code in the V6 emulator craps out under Windows 7 (and probably Vista too) – I noticed this when trying it out on a friend’s Core i7 machine the other day – but as this is the same as MFME, it’s clearly a DirectSound issue. Dilemma is whether I bother fixing it, as I have zero plans to move from XP for the foreseeable.

I learned that the new version of the V6Z80P board should be nearing a production run (sporting an eZ80 @ 50MHz amongst other goodies), so that’s something to look forward to. Quite fancy taking a look at one of those PandaBoards too… Mmm… Too many toys 😉

Finally, I’m hoping to work some more on EPEE/JPeMu v4 – And still hoping to actually post something about the latter (EDIT: I posted a couple of screenshots from the prototype for the time being; better than nothing!). It’s not that it’s some top-secret thing, it’s just that I’ve not had the time to gather together together some sane information about it, and there’s not exactly much to screenshot. I have loads of ideas; what I don’t have is a reasonable starting point! That’s the current goal.

No, no updates really. I “lost” my laptop a few weeks ago (it was getting a little old and contains one of the Nvidia chips with a known defect, an 8300GS) so it packed up. I could have had it inspected by an engineer and replaced under the Sale of Goods Act (despite its age), but that would’ve been a £50 gamble and frankly not worth it for a machine that old. Alternatively about £120 for an infra-red reflow job on the chip which would’ve been a temporary fix in any case. Again, not worth it.

Anyway, I’m back up and running now with a new (desktop) machine – nice Core-i7 2600K, but it’s taken till now to transfer the data from the old laptop completely. I guess next on the agenda is to find the fix for DirectSound now that I’m running Windows 7. I know that Chris Wren found the fix for MFME, but I’ll be damned if I know what it was. There’s now an Apple-I emulator for the eZ80P so I feel another emulator for it might be interesting. Phil’s added proper IRQ callbacks on the sound now, so should be possible (in theory) to write a SID/Yamaha emulator or something but work’s been keeping me pretty busy.